Prohibition Stories: The Underworld of Mountain View

The granddaughter of a bootlegger shares a family tale.

👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson, author of 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 my forthcoming memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Read the origin story of the book.) 🍇 The Centenarian Playbook is my newsletter, which features longevity tips and stories from Grandma Kay’s long life. It also includes stories of the Gemello Winery, which her late husband, Mario, ran for nearly half a century. 📖 I’m sure you’ll find my maternal grandparents are quite lovable characters.

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Prohibition Stories: The Underworld of Mountain View

Mountain View was a small, quiet, orchard-filled town¹ in the 1930s, but still had its share of bootleggers, speakeasies and even a bordello during Prohibition.

A common practice of this underground world was to use a legitimate business on the premises, like the dog-racing Blue and Gold Kennel Club, as a front for its brothel or other illicit activities.

The Blue and Gold Kennel Club, a 1930s-era speakeasy & bordello, was shut down by federal authorities in 1933. The building has since become an historical landmark in Mountain View.

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Brothers Fred and George Riccomi ran a vegetable farm as a front for their underground bootlegging operation on the corner of El Camino Real and San Antonio Road (now the site of the Walmart-anchored San Antonio Shopping Center), according to Connie Bertrand, Fred’s granddaughter. 

She tipped me off to this fascinating tale after seeing last month’s Mountain View Voice’s feature article about my upcoming book about the Gemello Winery, which was launched at the end of Prohibition.

Bertrand said Grandfather Fred provided the Gemello Winery with its winepress, which my grandfather, Mario Gemello, used to extract juice from crushed grapes. My mother, Pat Ferguson, remembers the winepress stationed in front of the winery throughout most of her childhood in the 1940’s and ‘50s. 

Coincidentally, several months before Bertrand and I discussed this story about the Riccomi-Gemello winepress connection, my mother was vacationing in Italy, and spotted a winepress, reminiscent of her childhood, and snapped this photo.

While many Italian transplants, like my great grandfather John Gemello, came to the Santa Clara valley with winemaking  in their blood, Bertrand said her grandfather forged a slightly different path.

“Fred Riccomi, a fellow Italian, was on the ‘distribution side’ of the liquor business during Prohibition,” she says.  

That’s where the intriguing story kicks into gear.

“[Fred and George] were more invested in distilling and moving trainloads of booze,” Bertrand says. “They built a still underground on that property. To evade federal agents, they dug the still deep and zig zagged the passage to the top so that the fumes were completely vented by the time they reached above ground. No smell – no problems with [the Feds]!”

“To evade federal agents, they dug the still deep and zig zagged the passage to the top so that the fumes were completely vented by the time they reached above ground,” Bertrand says.

Bertrand adds, “my mother had once told me her after-school job was to go down into the still and put the labels on the bottles. Lots and lots of bottles of wine, Cresta Blanca,² and gin.”  

In the 1950s, the developers who built the San Antonio Shopping Center found the still, Bertrand says. “By that time, my family was a couple of owners removed from the property.”

Years after Prohibition, the Riccomi brothers shifted their business efforts towards San Francisco, running night clubs. That included the famed Music Box (now called The Great American Music Hall), which during the 1940s, starred burlesque pioneer Sally Rand.³

Postscript:

Connie Bertrand passed away on February 27, 2024, at the age of 76. I greatly appreciate her sharing her grandfather’s story with me. You can read her obituary here.

1. Mountain View, the heart of Silicon Valley, has a population of 81,000 residents, according to the 2021 the US Census By contrast, the 1930 census count reported only 3,300 residents.

2. Cresta Blanca Winery launched in 1882 in Livermore Valley, Calif. It closed in 1965. The site is now a historical landmark.

3. Burlesque pioneer Sally Rand and the Riccomi brothers were partners in the Music Box from 1936 til 1946.